Founded in Los Angeles in Fall 2014, Angel City Review is a literary journal that is committed to bringing the cutting edge in fiction and poetry to a modern audience, with an emphasis on writers based in Los Angeles. (http://angelcityreview.com/)

Silly Girl who do you think you are? always blaming the stars playing with fire dancing at the edge falling into dark corners there is a guardian roaming above your head the reason you’re not dead yet always taunting split second chances runaway chases take another sip forget remembering slip into night sky don’t care play music loud fast and louder invoke wonder thru muses infuse this mess you find yourself in come up for air come down from there the ladder is waiting the moon is lighting the earth is calling you home

The black guy is masturbating on Sixth again These homeless people are getting ridiculous There is this program up north, where they nicely ship them away for work programs It is really nice I don’t know if happy adverbs can make an internment camp sound OK Molina just cares about the Latinos Molina hates white people She doesn’t have a bike She didn’t go to the bike meeting We need more cops We need more security Another black guy masturbating I have a picture, I got up at at 4 a.m. and I caught him My dog needs a place to run Can we make that park private? We are bringing back Broadway ose businesses weren’t real You know what we mean I find your accusation that I am racist offensive Here we go again with the race card, you people and the race card My name is James T Butts and I am Black and I am here to let you know Bob isn’t racist That black homeless guy is out of control No one was even talking about race Obama is the best president ever This time it’s an Asian guy masturbating on Seventh Did not know they could be homeless? I thought that was a black thing What? I am not being offensive just honest I went out with an Asian lady once She was real Americanized and talked too much I had to break up with her I am not racist, the Irish were the first slaves I am not Irish, but I could be There you go again with the race card Race is relevant here your accusations of racism are why you people are masturbating all over this place And I voted for Obama, I told you that.

i make street lights appear on the ceiling until we can no longer be the same

like the red of a house of bricks from childhood like the dead rising from the pavement in the rain

*

there is an image in my headof me lying on my backon the ground outside the world trade center it was 1989and gary had told us to do that and look uphe said the building would look like it was going to fall on me

i remember visualizing it as he spoke i remember lying there on the ground

but i can’t ever rememberwhat it is that i sawwhat it was that took my breath away

*

what color am i, father?

*

he looked up at me from the floorat the bottom of the stairsbrieflybefore rolling away so i couldn’t see his face

i stood at the top of the stairs hesitatingas i tried to hide all of my secrets

he couldn’t call to meand i wouldn’t run down to him

because neither of us could admit the distance between us.

*

he stands over meas i drown in my sweat

he leans down and puts his hands on my legs holding my kneelike a fruit

No need to tell a pregnant woman how big she looks or doesn’t look for where she is at in her pregnancy Or what she should put in her body Or that she will never sleep again Or have a life No need Because her orbit is being dictated by the cosmos Her poundage determined by the gods Her intake Her outtake Her purpose Her music Her muse Her pains Her healing Are far beyond the opinion you carry Shaped by a society who hides the truths of what bringing a life to this planet actually entails Tides rise in her brain, in her being, that are inexplicable You can call it phrases like “mommy brain” or “nesting” But from where I sit and where my eyes gaze And what my mind wraps upon None of that is the case In factAncient symbols communicate And as I struggle to pick objects up o the ground Or raise myself out of the bed or a car or a chair As my eyelashes fall to the ground And my breathing is labored As my digits swell And my head bends over the toilet another time I know this great creation Exits To bloom the blossoms of sacred eternity Exploding inside me A spindle Weaving a magic beyond comprehension Creation is messy Creation is messy Creation is messy And to be respected Some of the greatest warriors in history brought life here So don’t clown Or underestimate what a woman can do with a babe in her arms The alchemy she can create Illuminating the healing of century old stuck Stop buying into the western world’s way of putting a woman in her place Stop and reconsider Chose something different This piece is dedicated to the voice in me That no longer need be silent And in turn the collective voice By giving voice And speaking truth We instantly being to transmute the ignorance And recreate the paradigm

they said the war on drugs was a war on the poor, because the institutions are inhabited by the apartheid imagination.

i place this line against the apartheid imagination.

the apartheid imagination requires no location, no physical body; because it has laws, records, court buildings, cells, conversations and life. it has radio programs, all-white movies, jailhouse mythologies, 2-D images. before the latest killings started, it was there, and when the killers are forgotten, the apartheid imagination goes on thinking, dreaming up new killers.

who remembers the ones who killed emmet till, medgar evers and fred hampton? who remembers the guy who shot renisha mcbride? who cares about aryan nation jason ‘gunny’ bush who executed jonathan bumstead of the aryan nation also of wenatchee wa for being a ‘race traitor’ and who shot 9 year old brisenia ores in the face in arivaca az? who remembers the men of the 11th infantry brigade who machine-gunned the women and children in the ditches of my lai? who remembers names of soldiers of the 7th cavalry who received the national medal of honor for slaughtering 300 men, women and children at wounded knee? who bothers to remember james earl ray? who remembers the massacre sites of california?

i place this line in front of the images of trayvon martin, of jordan davis. i place this line at the images of muhammad al-durrah, iman darweesh al hams, wajih ramahi.

i place this line alongside the images of abdulrahman al-awlaki and brisenia ores. i place this line transparently over the names of jose antonio elena rodriguez, sergio hernandez gueraca, ramses barron torres.

they were shot by the border patrol, walking or running, shot in the back. they were killed by israeli forces using 3.1 billion dollars in 2013 u.s. military aid. they were blown apart by a CIA drone ring a $70,000 agm-114 hellfire missile into a cafe.

they were killed by racists operating out of the apartheid imagination. the apartheid imagination was created by genocide against indians and slavery of africans as a construction designed to kill white conscience and memory. anyone entering into the apartheid imagination is a white man or an indian or a rebel slave.

it uses a hegemony of all-white images to convince white people any interest they may have is worth more than any life identified as other. it’s a strong mechanism for killing people around the world like indonesia, rwanda, palestine or india.

i have stood in the line for black and brown people at traffic court when i was the whitest one there, and the judge, an asian american guy substituting for the regular judge who was on holiday let everyone go without a fine.

i have stood in my mom’s kitchen window on a hill in the city terrace and watched the pillars of smoke rising for days over the city of los angeles.

i have stood at the counter in the laundry of the men’s county jail downtown in the fumes of dry cleaning chemicals handing out and collecting bags of laundry and seen the faces of the men in line (where one guy always comes along trying to look like a stone killer and says, “pass me some fucking money or i will fuck you up,” and maybe he was a stone killer, but i just returned his stare and took the next guy’s bag).

i have waited in the plastic chairs and long lines of the DMV and i have seen who is waiting.

i’ve had lacerations cleaned out, my face x-rayed and patched up in the ER at county general hospital and seen who is waiting.

i have read poems in front of crowds of hundreds in universities from sf state to naropa, from university of minnesota to suny buffalo and i have looked out on those faces and seen who is walking across the campus at hunters college and cal state fullerton, at the state colleges and the private colleges.

i have seen who is in the jail and in the court house line, who is waiting for a job outside home depot and orchard supply.

i’ve driven streets of towns of the hinterland where white teenagers scream something out of their cars and race away.

fuck the apartheid imagination, that’s what i’m saying, death to the apartheid imagination and its english courses and its ideologies taught in the universities and churches, piss on the all white movies pretending to be set in an all-white los angeles, all-white calif., all-white america, piss on the the norton anthology of post modern all white poetry and the norton anthology of all white american hybrid poetry, piss on all the little cliques of literati publishing all-white catalogs (with maybe one or 2 tokens) and touting another white guy as the latest wonderful thing (that thing is old, it’s so old now), arnold schwarzenegger and ronald reagan were your fleeting white icons of pre-eminence, they were happy to see half my family two generations dispossessed and sent to live in horse stalls of santa anita racetrack and colorado river internment camps, happy to go along with lives being destroyed, happy to sign some apology letters decades later, put up a few plaques on historical sites out in the desert.

who remembers individuals operating behind the poison alzheimer’s of the apartheid imagination?

who shall remember the mushroom cloud of the apartheid imagination when the next killers are shooting, murder a child in the headlines, and the people post and repost all the images, talking laws, discussing footnotes and factoids?

the names are in the ground, the apartheid imagination like a shadow above them. i place this line in front of it saying my whole life has been against it, and the rest of my life will be against it.

Being a rush of myth & vapour there exists a panoramic fog of poetic jackals’ blazes appearing on lower planes as the froth of refraction

here there exists the scarlet base of bluish jaguar’s ink of sculpted swans within the air of seminal polar initiation not unlike the dialectics of water having the somnolent power of vertiginous cobalt emanation

that sleep hammer/ how you hold itand I let you how I let you/so that we have matching wounds

I put my body between my mother and my sister’s body /she never missed I didn’t let her miss. Once, younger, stupid, I ducked or ran from her and I was sorry

what names float the ghost namethe girl who won’t come when calledexcept that I have no name to call herI use smoke as signals the way my mother does with me(can a house be built can a house be moved what is there )there isthere is(disappearing people)

2.

breaking as waves as glass slippers/what makers demandwhat salt is: protection against the works of othersor misfortunewhat is language but tripwire/or a bridgefrom far away sisters wave to usthe hand that holds your name like longing /whenI put my teeth together to say your first syllable my mouth waters with sorrow

3.

(which flood)

(joy)

stubborn door, this skin and burial in this body sounds of laughter and breaking and instruments the body as instrument the line of a childhood a turning away or running away /wilderness/ starting from a home to a world/ a life the ocean for the rst time

(the first time the tide lapped at my ankles I wept with shame/I apologize mother this is my body/my father held my hand and laughed at the water).

and burial and burial and burial a song again a lingering and forming how like a life how the body becomes and then disappears mother who gives permission to cry who makes the rain and drought mountains crumble so that forests can rise under the feet of wolves (something about peaches and moons/a potted mint and portraiture) and what things quake, a limb, a lip, the continent with my desire for your trembling and my body as this wilderness what trembling and then stillness old as wolves I want to hold your face my (sparrow the kind of bird who keeps secrets)

4.

fever when it comes is a house on fire is the unrelenting rain far from the body that suffers cold I saw you or the mirage of you or was it your shadow or did I dream you/ I had a little aunt who was only ash and she never answers when I call (arrow catcher, here come ashes)

5.

Here is a broken body/ there is a bruised wilderness/ the body in a wilderness making new an autumn a time of sleep and graying

I picked glass from the soil to protect my family I nursed a sore paw the calico follows me wherever I go/ she is not afraid of wolves

6.

But there are fires to forget but we can’t forget even when we don’t remember (I remember her/ my color, my scowl the lost twin soul) they say the old dragon drank to forget her. I think it was to remember. A tired and sad dragon, he was cruel except to me. His laughter made the doves trill away from the palms. He lifted me onto the red filly. He told me she was mine and I named her Golondrina, after the birds that never stay.

you carry the place/ the death/ where is a place not crooked not covered in dust left by a terrible night left by those wonderful nights and the night of loss too and the nights of laughter

burn/break/live or not some cell in your body deciding what to do what comes next and the atoms of the universe arrange themselves in such a way to let you pass. what the ocean is /what names map/ what use is the body that can be broken/ or taken/that just fades away.

7.

(Paterfamilias) a shadow a bone its marrow a hand/ a body under another’s hand and care a tiny death (mine)I wait for a sun I want to be your first place that place of snow marked by your breaththe Mystery Of all of the leaving naming and the longing and I want it to be my name my song and I am not okay and can’t say the words so I sulk from across the plains and trees in March there is death and longing and the month of March does not belong to me

8.

the places where you are from are always on fire this city or that country or this body (what if I told you this city of yours is my body I have mapped it in bridges and train tracks)